Three City Council seats were won April 2 by candidates endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America and a fourth was too close to call. Two more socialists had won seats in the first round of the election.

Not long ago, calling yourself a socialist could get a rock thrown through the window of your campaign headquarters.

Yet before that, there was nothing remarkable about being a socialist politician in Chicago. Even the Tribune could claim one, albeit perhaps reluctantly.

Joseph Patterson was the editor of the Tribune and helped to run the 1908 presidential campaign of Eugene Victor Debs, founder of the Socialist Party. A child of immense wealth, Patterson was drawn to socialism because he was horrified by the conditions Chicago’s poor had to endure. Reading an expose of life in the Stockyards neighborhood, he moved there to see it for himself.

Poster for the socialist presidential ticket of 1904, with portraits of Eugene Victor Debs and Ben Hanford, along with symbols of their support for union and labor and their motto "Workers of the World Unite." (Corbis)

At the turn of the 19th century, Chicago generally had a couple of socialist aldermen representing working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. In 1918, John Kennedy, a socialist alderman, hailed his fellow socialist W.E. Rodriguez’s 15th Ward: “This is the reddest Ward in the City,” Kennedy exhorted its voters. “Keep it Red!”

But after World War II, red wasn’t a winning color. The Soviet Union’s tanks had established a satellite empire in Eastern Europe. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was preaching that communists posed a similar danger here. And in the hysteria that followed, the distinction between socialism and communist totalitarianism was blurred. That’s why Chicago’s newest leftist aldermen style themselves Democratic Socialists.

And wonder of wonders, socialism is once again respectable, thanks in part to Donald Trump. The president has incessantly vilified his opponents and their policies as “socialistic” — including first and foremost Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. That has led some, especially younger Americans, to say: “If adequate medical care is socialistic, then maybe I’m a socialist.”